Language Development in Internationally Adopted Children

Language Development in Internationally Adopted Children

by Boris Gindis PhD.

Despite numerous individual differences, all internationally adopted (IA) children have one common task: they must learn a new language.

From a school's perspective, IA children belong to a large and diverse category of students called “English Language Learners” (ELL). This group consists mostly of children who were born outside the U.S. and arrived in the country with their families or were born to language-minority families who live here. These are bilingual children who normally use both English and their first languages within a developmentally appropriate and socially expected range of language skills. Most importantly, these children continue to use their first language in their families.

Although part of the ELL group, IA children differ significantly from the rest of the ELL population. They are not bilingual. They are monolingual upon arrival and after several months are monolingual again, only this time in English. With few exceptions, there is a tendency in school settings to consider IA children bilingual and to apply to them the accumulated insights, knowledge, and practices regarding language acquisition in bilingual persons. This is an erroneous approach.

Additive and Subtractive Language Learning Models in IA Children

Internationally adopted children learn English in a different way from "typical" members of the ELL group. A new language is usually acquired based on one of two models: "additive" or "subtractive." When the second language is added to child's skills with no substantial detraction from the native language, it is called the additive model of language learning. When and if, in the process of second language acquisition, the first language diminishes in use and is replaced by the second language, we call this the subtractive model of language learning.

The subtractive model is characteristic for IA children, who are "circumstantial" language learners: individuals who, due to their circumstances, must learn a different language in order to survive. They are forced by circumstances to acquire English, and they do so in a context in which their first language has no use at all. This means that while learning English for the traditional ELL population is akin in many aspects to learning a foreign language, for IA children English language acquisition is more akin to the natural ways in which first languages are developed. An IA child is completely immersed in the language and acquires English as a by-product of meaningful interaction in joint activities in the new family. The motivational urge to acquire the new language is much more intense in adopted children than it is in immigrant families and bilingual children.

Most internationally adopted children live in monolingual English-speaking families. This means that a child needs functional English for survival and does not need his/her first language for any practical purposes. The child’s adoptive family is the primary source of patterns of proper English but this family cannot be a sustained source of the first language. In this situation, the first language quickly loses its functional meaning and personal sense for an adopted child. It results in a peculiar situation where an English language learner has the English language as the home's only language, and it leads also to a rapid attrition of the first language. Within the first year in the U.S. the English language becomes the only language of an IA child.

Communicative Language and Cognitive Language

Adoptive parents are usually amazed and pleased by their child's progress in mastering basic communication skills and see no apparent reason to worry about language development. As early as first grade, however, problems might emerge. Unfortunately, neither teachers nor parents are equipped to understand that the child's conversational proficiency in English is not sufficient to ensure mastery of the English language needed for successful school performance.

There are two domains of language usage: communicative language and cognitive language. Communicative language refers to the language skills needed for social interaction in everyday communication within a practical context. It includes basic skills in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar and is supported by gestures, facial expressions, intonation, and body postures.

Cognitive language refers to language as a tool of reasoning, a means of literacy, and a medium for academic learning. This language function emerges